The Witches: Salem, 1692 Part 9

What sets Salem apart is not the accusations but the convictions. At other times raving women had been said to be witches and men dreamed of the devil without anyone thinking twice about it. Why the unsparing prosecution in 1692? Mather implied that the Glover case played a role, the laundress having displayed her spells for all to see. Several on the Court of Oyer and Terminer were better at executing orders than at formulating them; they bent easily to the greater will. Hathorne, Corwin, and Gedney-the prime movers-acted in the interests of the orthodoxy, which happened to align with their personal agendas. They knew who the troublemakers were, having been called upon to mediate in Salem village for years. As its "uncharitable expressions and uncomely reflections," its "settled prejudice, and resolved animosity" fermented into witchcraft, they promoted that transformation. Parris, Noyes, Barnard, and Hale eagerly backed them up. All signs point to their having been in the thrall of William Stoughton, their elder by a generation, nearly a father to young Mather.

With the question of why Stoughton-a political contortionist for over a decade-remained inflexible on witchcraft, one comes closest to the riddle of Salem. No doc.u.mentation survives; it is more difficult to make sense of his intransigence than of Foster's flight to a satanic Sabbath. Both followed to some extent from their faith. Stoughton embraced spectral evidence, contrary to legal opinion; he departed from all precedent. After the hastily rearranged political allegiances, he took and held a stand. One may well account for the other. Firm hands were in order; Stoughton responded with clenched fists. He had known disfavor. He had no interest in returning to it.* Along with two other witchcraft justices, Stoughton had collaborated actively with the "alien incubus" that was Dominion rule. Here was an opportunity for those men to rehabilitate themselves, to prove their mettle by dispelling a new intruder. They were now the righteous enforcers, the ones lifting that "standard against the infernal enemy." The only individual who could easily have slowed or reversed Salem's course, Stoughton elected not to do so. He believed as firmly in spectral evidence in 1693 as he had in 1692, or at least claimed to. He worked under an absent, weak governor who displayed little interest in the trials. Hathorne handed Stoughton a situation that was out of control well before Phips arrived and in which the new governor had no cause to involve himself. Afterward-as with the half-read May commission-he fumbled in attempting both to prove his piety to Ma.s.sachusetts and his competence to London.

Stoughton labored to prove not only his constancy but a new government's legitimacy. He was as aware as anyone that to the Crown the colony appeared lax, impertinent, disorderly. They had paid a crushing price for having deviated from the laws of England. In prosecuting witches he simultaneously redeemed himself at home and broadcast New England's proficiency abroad; the colonists could govern themselves, in an orderly, Old World way. They were no riotous, irresponsible teenagers after all. They prosecuted subversives. They could show up those English officials who sniffed that Ma.s.sachusetts was without law, courts, justice, or government. The crisis provided a great number of people-Barnard, Noyes, Cotton Mather, several adolescent girls, many Ma.s.sachusetts authorities, the colony itself-a chance to show up their elders, all too happy to remind them, as the king a.s.sured New England, that they existed only by someone else's grace and favor.* What they had been given could also be taken away, nails on the blackboard of the adolescent mind.

The new charter reconst.i.tuted the judicial system, of which Andros had made a travesty and on which a new administration depended. The colony reeled still from those "barbarous usages." Stoughton may have set out to prove that New England was not, as the deposed governor had scoffed, "a place where none do and few care to understand (if they can help it) the laws or methods of England." They had much to lose, a reputation for civil disobedience to live down. Coursing public anger played a role; men who had overthrown a despot had no desire to face a mob. As an ousted Dominion official had warned in 1689, those who removed Andros were "like young conjurers, who had raised a devil they could not govern." Indeed the New England clergy had promoted the tale of that earlier implacable invader, the red-coated one with his sinister designs who had been heard to sneer that Puritans "were a people fit only to be rooted off the face of the earth." They lent it to a witch gang intent on establishing "perhaps a more gross diabolism, than ever the world saw before." They did not have to imagine that story, having themselves partic.i.p.ated in it. The trials allowed them to dispel a stain of their own.

The clergy could resist in no meaningful way. They were known to have blown the bellows of sedition against the previous administration, to have preached up a rebellion, to have craftily incited a mob. They could not undermine a government that, at great cost, they had themselves installed. To vindicate the court was to vindicate the new charter; they too looked to prove themselves not in Boston but in London, where Mather aimed Wonders. Three years of anarchy and five of Dominion rule had been costly. The justices were moreover their patrons and sponsors, the men who paid their salaries. The ministers were as blindsided by the crisis as everyone else. But witchcraft allowed them to prove G.o.d's special stake in New England. It must be awfully important if Satan stood so intent on destroying it! The a.s.sault on Salem allowed a younger generation of clergymen to prove their worth in a cosmic battle. It fulfilled a prophecy too; here was the storm before the much advertised millennial calm, a last-ditch showdown with the devil.

For all of his 1692 fast days, for all of his warnings against spectral evidence, torture, and touch tests, for all of his hand-wringing, Cotton Mather did not find the a.s.sault of evil angels entirely unwelcome. In a 1693 doc.u.ment not meant for public consumption, he offered what may qualify as his most genuine a.s.sessment of the episode. It was certainly the most d.a.m.ning. Mather wrestled mightily with this statement; it is heavily blotted and redacted. What had Salem witchcraft yielded? No one of worth had been compromised. The "lively demonstrations of h.e.l.l" had awakened many souls-young souls, especially, of both genders. Mather knew that calamity reliably filled the church; evangelically speaking, little rivaled an earthquake. "The devil got just nothing," reasoned Mather, as he meditated on the crisis, "but G.o.d got praises, Christ got subjects, the Holy Spirit got temples, the Church got addition, and the souls of men got everlasting benefits." Reversing his position on his own involvement, he preened a little: "I am not so vain as to say that any wisdom or virtue of mine did contribute unto this good order of things, but I am so just as to say I did not hinder this good." Any discomfort for having failed to shut down the trials had vanished. He decried only one monstrous injustice: the a.s.sault on his reputation.

Cases of Conscience, the advice of the New York ministers, Mary Esty's pet.i.tion, and Giles Corey's gruesome death may have helped to extinguish the witchcraft. But as the casualties piled up, the terror rushed toward the authorities' front doors. When it did, the moment had pa.s.sed. (The skeptic Robert Calef credited whoever had accused Mrs. Phips.) Blame could not be attributed, belonging as it did to too many addresses. Mystification yielded to mortification. It is unclear who actually heard Thomas Brattle's wise, unwelcome words; by October too many had been recalling (or inventing) twenty-five-year-old slights to be able to accuse anyone else of delusion. Firmly established, witchcraft exerted a magnetic pull on every glinting irritation, fear, grudge, peculiarity, offense; there was as much stray odium and animosity in Ess.e.x County as there were mangy dogs and marauding pigs. The community played the chorus, striking at empty air with canes, rapiers, and staffs, marveling as moths flew through the meetinghouse, chipping in oddities and old tales, rumored, recovered, invented. Everyone had his reasons.

The irony that they had come to the New World to escape an interfering civil authority was lost on the colonists, who unleashed on one another the kind of abuse they had deplored in royal officials. So was the fact that the embrace of faith, meant to b.u.t.tress the church, would tear it irrevocably apart; the wonder tales harvested to prove New England's special status undermined it in the end. Political concerns outweighed all others, as political concerns had produced both Ill.u.s.trious Providences and Memorable Providences. Mather's account of the witchcraft would be inseparable from his life of Phips; the authorities believed they protected a fledgling administration. They had contracted a kind of autoimmune disorder, deploying against themselves the very furies they so feared. There were in 1692 no perpetrators, and no consequences. Only a small, supernatural figure remained at the scene of the crime.* He did resolve one mystery while in Salem: indeed the devil needs conscious human collusion to work evil.

Witchcraft effectively aroused a lapsed, sluggish generation, though not as the clergy had antic.i.p.ated. When the spell broke, the torrent of recriminations swept away a rich layer of faith. Ma.s.sachusetts leaders would never again apply to the church for advice. Nor would an additional hint surface of a witches' meeting or an aerial mishap. As for the phantom Frenchmen and Indians, by 1698 the nattily dressed invaders were understood to be satanic agents, "demons in the shape of armed Indians and Frenchmen." The best minds in Ess.e.x County continued to believe them implicated somehow in the witchcraft. They never reappeared, fading imperceptibly away, like the indelible scene in the book you read as a child and never manage to find again.

XII.

A LONG TRAIN OF MISERABLE CONSEQUENCES.

People were chasing the wrong rabbit.

-DONALD RUMSFELD ROUGHLY HALF OF the afflicted girls grew up, found husbands, and had children, if not necessarily in that order. Betty Parris married late and raised a family in Concord. No trace remains of her cousin Abigail, the exuberant witch hunter. She may have been the girl reported to have experienced "diabolical molestations to her death" and who died, still single, in 1697. Like Ann Putnam, Susannah Shelden failed to marry, highly uncommon in seventeenth-century New England. She wound up in Rhode Island charged as a "person of evil fame," which was more common. Betty Hubbard found a husband only at thirty-six. Sarah Churchill, the Jacobs servant, married at forty-two, having earlier paid a fine for fornication. Mercy Lewis, the Putnams' maid, bore an illegitimate child; she later married and moved to Boston. Mary Walcott, Abigail Hobbs, and Mary Lacey Jr. raised their families the old-fashioned way, several of them in the immediate area. For all of the deviations, at least some of the village girls appear to have turned out like the afflicted Goodwin girl, described in adulthood as "a very sober, virtuous woman"-and who never for a minute denied that she had witnessed witchcraft.

The village ministers fared less well. James Bayley, who had introduced the future Ann Putnam Sr. to the village, fell on hard times in Roxbury. Samuel Sewall visited with cakes, with money for firewood, and, less helpfully, with verses by Reverend Noyes. Suffering from pleurisy, Bayley died an excruciating death in 1707. Having provided the most indelible portrait of the Salem shrieks and teeth marks, Deodat Lawson returned to England. Hemming and hawing a little, he republished his witchcraft account in 1704, to lift the enduring censure on his friends and insist yet again on the "operations of the powers of darkness." The first to attempt to make sense of the epidemic, he remained the last retailing an account of it, the surviving 1963 Dallas Secret Service agent hawking his wares. Not long thereafter Lawson committed an indiscretion that left him issuing solemn apologies to the London ministry. He acknowledged having dishonored his profession with his "uneven and unwary conversation." He battled for several years to clear his name. The offense may have had nothing to do with sensationalistic witchcraft p.r.o.nouncements; he may simply have drunk too much. He had however spoken carelessly, as he could be said to have done in 1692. By 1714 he lived in abject poverty, his family starving, his three young children infected with smallpox, his wife debilitated. He tried unsuccessfully to raise funds for a collection of sermons, throwing himself on the mercy of friends. If no relief were forthcoming, he warned, "we must unavoidably perish." He would be remembered as "the unhappy Mr. Deodat Lawson."

Samuel Parris remarried and fathered a second family. Trailed by the "difficulties and disturbances" of his ministry, he drifted about, landing in six communities over twelve years. He taught school, raised livestock, sold fabrics and sundries, preached in the smallest settlement in Ma.s.sachusetts, and speculated in land. He overreached in one transaction; arrested for debt, he spent a few weeks of 1706 in jail in Cambridge. Having written and rewritten his will, Parris died in Sudbury at sixty-seven, a moderately wealthy man though one who continued to feel the world had shortchanged him. If he wrote another word on what he deemed that "very sore rebuke, and humbling providence," it has not survived. His estate did not include his Salem pasture, which he had sold earlier.

The village replaced Parris with a newly minted minister half his age. A Cambridge native, Joseph Green had been at Harvard in 1692; he well knew the singular history of the parsonage into which he moved, also with an Indian slave. A more temperate man, Green inherited a chastened flock. He welcomed back the dissenting brethren and reseated the meetinghouse, placing Nurses alongside Putnams, a daughter of Rebecca Nurse beside her accuser's mother, where the women would have heard Ann Putnam Jr.'s 1706 apology. Against much opposition, Green reversed Martha Corey's excommunication sentence.* It required less effort to convince his parishioners that they might breathe more easily in a new meetinghouse. They moved down the road, to the corner of Centre and Hobart Streets, where the First Church of Danvers stands today. The lumber of the old meetinghouse was left to decay, which it could not do quickly enough. Closure proved elusive; the Burroughs children pet.i.tioned still for redress in 1750. Green preached against fortune-telling a decade after Salem. Parishioners still slept in their pews. And Putnams complained of Salem village preaching.

A 1704 visitor found Ma.s.sachusetts an uncomfortable place where no one knew "on his lying down to sleep, but that he might lose his life before the morning, by the hands of a merciless savage." Sewall woke from nightmares about the French in 1706. Mather nearly crossed paths with marauding Indians outside Andover that year; a niece disappeared into captivity at around the same time. While talk of evil angels quieted, the Apocalypse remained imminent. Mather forecast it for 1715. Sewall and Noyes still heatedly disputed pa.s.sages of Revelation. Six-foot-long mermen with forked tails appeared on the rocks of Branford, Connecticut, as Cotton Mather alerted London's Royal Society. In the early 1730s, the Boston clergy stepped in to heal "the mischievous unChristian divisions and contentions arising and prevailing" among the Salem town parishioners, their minister as "unpeacable" as Parris had been.

The trials did not upend the church, but-a.s.sisted by the new charter and in conjunction with forces already in motion-they did erode its foundation. Attempting to prove one thing, the Puritan orthodoxy had proved quite another. The very idea of confession had been contaminated. Mather had warned that the Lord sent down devils to "stop the mouths of the faithless"; not incorrectly, Robert Calef noted that those evil angels created a fair number of atheists. Hale was not alone in more strictly scanning his principles. When the new Ma.s.sachusetts governor took the oath of office a decade after Salem, he did so in a traditional, Bible-kissing Anglican ceremony. Mather found himself ordaining Baptists. Sewall lived to see Christmas celebrated. There had been no flying before 1692 and there would be none afterward. People accused one another of witchcraft well into the eighteenth century, but Ma.s.sachusetts would not execute another witch.*

We all apologize, or fail to, in our own ways. Increase Mather turned from the study of devils to the study of angels. In 1721, a smallpox epidemic raged through Boston. Cotton Mather faced down the entire medical establishment to advocate something that seemed every bit as dubious as spectral evidence: inoculation. He had studied medicine at Harvard; he had come to well understand infectious disease. Moving from imps and witches to germs and viruses, he finally located the devils we inhale with every breath. The battle turned so vitriolic that it dragged Salem out of hiding, allowing Mather to be bludgeoned for lunacy on two counts. (It also allowed him to drag the devil back onstage. Given the "cursed clamor," Satan seemed to have taken possession of Boston.) He remained as steadfast on the subject of inoculation as he had been equivocal on witchcraft. A homemade bomb came sailing in his window at three o'clock one morning. His reputation never recovered.*

The trials claimed more casualties than were clear at the time; the devil himself failed to recover. Present though the Old Deluder remained-if you committed adultery in Ma.s.sachusetts in 1721, you did so "by instigation of the devil"-"the roaring lion, the old dragon, the enemy of all righteousness," as Parris had it in his apology, faded from the scene. He grew more abstract as evil retreated inside, less the master conspirator than the shadow of our poor judgment. By the end of Betty Parris's lifetime, he had come, as a modern scholar has put it, to bear more resemblance to "a leprechaun than to the old grandmaster of h.e.l.l." Women also fared poorly after Salem, or at least went back to being invisible, where they remained, historically speaking, until a different scourge encouraged them to raise their voices, with suffrage and Prohibition.

In 1728, the year of Mather's death, a Medford minister could write off witchcraft as the stuff of fairy tales. Salem was very nearly ready to become one itself, to be recast and retold. At the same time Sewall resigned as chief justice. He lived two more years, attuned as ever to birdsong and rainbows, concerned with safeguarding the Ma.s.sachusetts charter at all costs, to the end tripping over his conscience for the sake of consensus. In 1728 Topsfield and Salem resolved their border dispute. By the time of his death at 109, Martha Carrier's widower had the satisfaction of seeing that Salem witchcraft had become the "supposed witchcraft" and that the villain of the piece was no longer his wife, the queen of h.e.l.l, or even her so-called confederates. Sorcery yielded to possession, by the middle of the eighteenth century to fraud. It would require only another few decades for Brattle's suggestion that the witches had more likely been the accusers to register, for anyone to note that authorities get feverish, too.

The trials would take their place among those historical events that never happened until a generation or two after they did. Once they flickered back to life they refused to dim. Of all the portents and prophecies-those of the visionary girls, the boastful specters, the Mathers, the Salem woman who forecast a second storm of witchcraft-only Thomas Brattle's came true. Ages would not "wear off that reproach and those stains which these things will leave behind them upon our land."* John Adams cited the trials as a "foul stain upon this country," an irony for proceedings that had been intended to purify. The frenzy unleashed by a three-pence duty on tea seemed to one 1773 Ma.s.sachusetts lawyer absurd, "and more disgraceful, to the annals of America than that of witchcraft." Salem came in especially handy over the second half of the nineteenth century; it provided an effective piece of shrapnel when North and South took aim at each other. Frederick Dougla.s.s asked how the belief in slavery was any bit less objectionable than that in sorcery. Abolition, argued others, was a hallucination on par with Salem witchcraft. The 1860 election of Lincoln struck terror in the slave-owning South, leading a popular magazine to screech: "The North, who having begun with burning witches, will end by burning us!" All could agree on one matter: when you wanted to reach the emotional high notes, you reached for Salem.

New England's enemies arguably did more than anyone to keep Salem alive, as for so long the church had sustained the devil. The South woke in the nineteenth century to the fact that "those bigoted, fanatical, mischief-making, would-be enlighteners" north of the Mason-Dixon Line wrote the schoolbooks, with lasting effects. Something needed to be done; the Salem misstep helped to remodel the New England past. In the midst of the Civil War, President Lincoln officially established Thanksgiving, Pilgrim feasts being preferable to Puritan fasts. Decades earlier, Daniel Webster had delivered his Plymouth Rock oration, and people who had not persecuted witches or left a paper trail-or left much of any kind of trail at all-became the ur-Americans. Blameless, if colorless, the Pilgrims made better ancestors than did peevish, intolerant, urban, upper-cla.s.s witch hunters. For a century or so they replaced their fanatical cousins.

It turns out to be eminently useful to have a disgrace in your past; Salem endures not only as a metaphor but as a vaccine and a taunt. It glares at us when fear paralyzes reason, when we overreact or overcorrect, when we hunt down or deliver up the alien or seditious. It endures in its lessons and our language. In the 1780s, enemies of the Federalists accused that party of launching a "detestable and nefarious conspiracy" to restore the monarchy. Anti-Illuminists warned of prowling Jesuits, of the Catholic serpent already coiled about, with sinister political designs. "We must awake," they warned in 1835, "or we are lost." The judge sentencing the Rosenbergs for espionage in 1951 termed theirs a "diabolical conspiracy to destroy a G.o.d-fearing nation." A network of subversives, night-and-day vigilance, the watchtowers of the nation, and reckless cruelty returned with the 1954 McCarthy hearings. It took very little in 1998 to turn Linda Tripp into the nosy Puritan neighbor and Ken Starr into a witch hunter.

English monarchs would continue to conspire-or appear to conspire-against the people. It is no surprise that the seventeenth-century Ma.s.sachusetts authorities so often sounded like understudies for the Founding Fathers. Somewhere along the line those men had decided that obedience to G.o.d did not tally with allegiance to monarchs; it was less a love of democracy than a hatred of authority that is their chief contribution to the national DNA. As John Adams saw it, Ma.s.sachusetts had compromised itself more by accepting Increase Mather's 1691 charter than by prosecuting witches. The same defiance, the same brooding sense of sanctified purpose that delivered the trials culminated in a revolution, the legacy of further hand-wringing about property lines, tax rates, and trespa.s.s.*

As dogma, the crusade against evil, and the ecstatic embrace of justice combined in Salem, they do too in what has been termed the paranoid style in American politics. When Richard Hofstadter described "the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy," the national distempers that occasionally descend upon us, he could have been describing Ess.e.x County in 1692. That apocalyptic, absolutist strain still bleeds into our thinking. English officials in Ma.s.sachusetts wrote off the ludicrous papist talk. "There are not two Roman Catholics betwixt this and New York," snorted an imprisoned Andros adviser in 1689; as for the rest of the designs against New England, they were delusional, "false and strangely ridiculous." But they very well might have been real. We are regularly being sacrificed to our heathen adversaries; in troubled times, we naturally look for traitors, terrorists, secret agents. Though in our imaginations, the business is indeed sometimes not imaginary. A little paranoia may even be salutary, though sometimes when you antic.i.p.ate a hailstorm, one eerily comes crashing down on your head.

A great number of Americans have made the same startling discovery that Francis Dane did: They are related to witches. American presidents descend from George Jacobs, Susannah Martin, and John Procter. Nathan Hale was John Hale's grandson. Israel "Don't Fire Until You See the Whites of Their Eyes" Putnam was the son of John Putnam. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louisa May Alcott descended from Samuel Sewall; Clara Barton from the Townes; Walt Disney from Burroughs. (In a nice twist, the colonial printer who founded the American Antiquarian Society, where Cotton Mather's papers reside today, was also a Burroughs descendant.) The Nurse family includes Lucille Ball, who testified before an investigator from the House Un-American Activities Committee. (Yes, she had registered with the Communist Party. No, she was not a Communist. In 1953, a husband leaped to a wife's defense: "The only thing red about Lucy is her hair," Desi Arnaz explained, "and even that's not legitimate.") No one reprocessed the toxic spill of 1692 as creatively as did Nathaniel Hawthorne, at whom the guilt of his great-grandfather gnawed.* Hawthorne redeemed that most Puritan of legacies in kind: with a shelf of literature, chilly, twilit pages that fall somewhere between sermons and stories. Others had put Salem on the literary map before he wrote "Young Goodman Brown," The Scarlet Letter, or his 1851 bestseller, The House of the Seven Gables, but Hawthorne proved that territory still radioactive. Guilt and blame have grown up lushly on the scene, attracting writers from Walt Whitman to John Updike. Arthur Miller read the court papers under the spell of McCarthyism. He discovered, as New England itself had, that events must be absorbed before monuments can be raised. The Crucible was not a success in 1953. Only when it outgrew the headlines and matured into allegory did the play find its audience. The Puritans come to most of us today through The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible, which we read, appropriately enough, as adolescents.

AS GENERAL WASHINGTON was presiding over the Const.i.tutional Convention on July 10, 1787, a mob attacked an old woman in the Philadelphia street outside. Accusing her of witchcraft, they pelted her with a slew of objects. She had cast a fatal spell on a child; weeks earlier, someone had cut her forehead "according to ancient and immemorial custom," as a newspaper had it-and precisely as a Salem visitor had attempted to slash Bridget Bishop. The 1787 woman died from her injuries. Witches might well rank among ghosts and fairies, as the Philadelphia papers noted, but they were not as easily dismissed. Alaska contended with a witchcraft epidemic in the late nineteenth century. In 1908 a Pennsylvania woman landed in jail for enchanting a cow. Sporadic a.s.saults continue today, although the modern American witch is dangerous rather than malicious, more likely to exude steamy s.e.xuality than to wield a scalding tongue. In a stunning inversion, empowered, nubile teenage witches-the new vampire-slayers-have taken over from the afflicted girls.

Salem village finally won its independence from Salem town in 1752. It renamed itself Danvers sixty years after the trials, which remained still the stuff of the recent unpleasantness. An 1895 reporter found town residents reluctant to talk about the past. When they did, it was to impress upon him that they had not burned a single witch. Years later Arthur Miller met with the same silence while researching The Crucible. "You couldn't get anyone to say anything about it," he complained of 1692. The two communities have since resolutely gone their separate ways. When current Danvers archivist Richard B. Trask began an excavation of the parsonage site in 1970, two elderly sisters waved fists at him from across the way, the kind of behavior that in another age elicited witchcraft accusations. "What are you bringing this up for?" they demanded. Meanwhile in Salem, Justice Corwin's gabled home has become "the Witch House," a misreading akin to making Dr. Frankenstein the monster. The town opted for brash commercialization, easier in the post-Bewitched era, when perky enchantresses twitched noses at vacuum cleaners. The mascot for Salem's sports teams is a witch on a broom. She sails across the local newspaper masthead and along doors of police cruisers; the best bakery in town has a Caffiend Club. In a turn of events that would have mystified Ann Foster, it is easy to buy a broomstick in Salem, home to a large Wiccan community. Hotels are booking now for next Halloween.*

When Ma.s.sachusetts exonerated the Salem victims in 1710 it overlooked six women. They remained missing through the 1940s and 1950s, as the commonwealth considered pardons but could not seem to make up its legislative mind. One lawyer appearing before a Senate committee objected to "fooling with history." Some legislators feared expensive suits for damages. Others hinted that a pardon might knock Salem's witches from their tourist-bewitching brooms. As the Commonwealth of Ma.s.sachusetts had not existed in 1692, it surely had no jurisdiction over a verdict of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay. On Halloween 2001-weeks after we began to wonder anew about unseen evils-Ma.s.sachusetts pardoned the last of the condemned. They included Susannah Martin and Bridget Bishop, who had transformed themselves into gleaming lights and disturbed men in their beds, afterward spending weeks together in a stifling prison. Parris had testified and Mather had written against both women. Bishop was not entirely sure she knew what a witch was. The convulsing girls wholly mystified her. "Do you think they are bewitched?" Hathorne asked Susannah Martin. "No," she had replied, three hundred and nine years before her pardon. "I do not think they are."

Frontispiece to Joseph Glanvill's much consulted 1681 volume. With una.s.sailable logic, the Royal Society fellow proved the existence of witchcraft; nothing so preposterous could be a sham. And how was it possible, asked Glanvill, "that imagination, which is the most various thing in the world, should infinitely repeat the same conceit in all times and places?" The "wonderful story of certain Swedish witches" traveled to New England with Glanvill as well. ( The British Library Board 084228) From a pamphlet on a sixteenth-century English witchcraft case. Four women stood accused of various misdeeds; three hanged within weeks of their arrest. English witches in particular maintained menageries of "familiars," demonic mascots that did their bidding. This one feeds her blood to her diabolical toads.

A sixteenth-century French woodcut, probably from a text that argued that witches could not perform magical feats but deserved to be prosecuted anyway as heretics. The prying neighbor observes a sort of time-lapse sequence as the witch spirits herself up the chimney. (The Bridgeman Art Library) The cover of a pamphlet on a Northamptonshire trial, at which several women were accused of murder and pig-bewitching. One of their victims suffered "such a gripping and gnawing in her body that she cried out and could scarce be held by such as came unto her."

A late-arriving, probably eighteenth-century set of English broomsticks. The devil rides along with two confederates; the woman on the ground is either an accomplice or a potential recruit. ( The British Library Board C13724-46, T. 1855 [19]).

Reverend Samuel Parris, in whose contested meadow the witches congregated. The miniature probably dates from just before the move to Salem. Parris had the proclivity for tidiness that creates a shambles. He could be sharp. "I cannot preach without study, I cannot study without fire, I cannot live quietly without study," he warned his disobliging parishioners, slow to provide firewood over the wretched winter of 16911692. (The Bridgeman Art Library/Ma.s.sachusetts Historical Society) Fragment of a monogrammed pewter plate-a rarity in seventeenth-century Salem village-excavated at the parsonage site. It is the only physical trace of Elizabeth Parris's existence. (Photograph by Richard B. Trask) The homemade walking sticks on which George Jacobs hobbled into court, to inform the justices he was as likely a buzzard as a wizard. (Peabody Ess.e.x Museum) Pins from the Salem proceedings, where they punctured throats and protruded from arms. They were removed, noted an eyewitness, "by the judges' own hands." One was found sticking upright in a victim's hair; another pierced an enchanted girl's upper and lower lips, binding them together, leaving her unable to testify. (Courtesy Danvers Archival Center) The restored Nurse homestead, where four villagers called on seventy-one-year-old Rebecca in March to break the news that she had been accused of witchcraft. "What sin has G.o.d found in me unrepented of that he should lay such an affliction upon me in my old age?" she asked once she had recovered from the shock. She hanged four months later. (Photograph by Richard B. Trask) The Salem village meetinghouse, reconstructed in 1985 and in better shape today than it was in 1692. Adolescent girls interrupted both hearings and sermons in the dimly lit 34-by-28-foot structure. (Photograph by Richard B. Trask) From the account of a 1621 English case, in which three young women-falling into fits and trances-conversed with dead siblings and specters. Among the accused was an old widow, known to have consorted for over forty years with a spirit in the shape of a great black cat; she appears here with her demon familiar as well. She was acquitted. ( The British Library Board B20051-69, Add. 32496 f.2) Increase Mather, Cotton's father, Harvard's president and New England's most eminent minister. The portrait dates from 1688, four years after the publication of Ill.u.s.trious Providences, a treasure trove of shipwrecks, portents, tempests, and possessions collected to political end. Those oddities proved New Englanders to be a chosen people on an exceptional mission. (American Antiquarian Society) Cotton Mather, later in life. Although largely absent from Salem, the twenty-nine-year-old minister wrote himself into the story; no one in Ma.s.sachusetts poked as insistently into and around the subject of witchcraft. Nor did anyone offer such contradictory opinions. In June, Mather advised the court to exercise "very critical and exquisite caution," five paragraphs later endorsing a "speedy and vigorous prosecution." (American Antiquarian Society) The Salem town jail keep's December 1693 accounting. A New England prisoner paid for his provisions, hay, and shackles; to the costs for having kept Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, Giles Corey, and his other prisoners, William Dounton added his salary, only partially paid since the Andros administration. The forty-pound total was nearly what a minister earned in a year. A prison could be built for the sum. (MSS 401, Phillips Library, Peabody Ess.e.x Museum) William Stoughton, the starchy chief justice and Harvard benefactor, among the most eminent of New England legal authorities. The survivor of four previous Ma.s.sachusetts administrations, Stoughton also served as deputy governor in 1692. (Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, H37) Samuel Sewall as he appeared in 1729, thirty-two years after he publicly repented for his role on the Salem court. Eager for political stability and intent on consensus, Sewell tripped occasionally over his conscience. (Peabody Ess.e.x Museum) Samuel Willard, the Boston minister who tactfully deviated from his colleagues. Satan could work his evil without entering into a formal pact with an accomplice; he could a.s.sume "the image of any man in the world." A generation earlier, Willard had conversed with the devil through a possessed sixteen-year-old servant girl. (Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, H18) Buccaneering Ma.s.sachusetts governor Sir William Phips, who absented himself from the trials, to wail afterward that "some who should have done their Majesties and this Province better service" had acted precipitously, a criticism aimed squarely at his deputy governor. The witchcraft stymied all official business; Phips's enemies exploited it, he complained, to undermine his fledgling administration. (Courtesy of Cory Gardiner) Margaret Sewall, the wife of court recorder Stephen Sewall, "that pearl of yours" in Cotton Mather's estimation. As a much younger woman, Mrs. Sewall took in Betty Parris, whom the devil followed, promising the enchanted nine-year-old anything her heart desired. (Peabody Ess.e.x Museum) An early list of witnesses against Sarah Good, the first deposed witch. t.i.tuba and Abigail Williams appear; though included in the original complaint, Betty Parris does not. The last name is that of a forty-four-year-old Salem town man. The trial list would include William Good, the defendant's husband. (From the records of the Court of Oyer and Terminer, 1692, property of the Supreme Judicial Court, Division of Archives and Records Preservation. On deposit at the Peabody Ess.e.x Museum) Convulsions and contortions as ill.u.s.trated for an 1881 study of hysteria, prefaced by the artist's mentor, Jean-Martin Charcot. The pioneering French neurologist suggested a connection between trauma and hysterical symptoms, on which Freud would build. (From Etudes Cliniques sur la Grande Hysterie ou Hystero-Epilepsie, Division of Rare and Ma.n.u.script Collections, Cornell University Library) An indictment against Reverend George Burroughs for having "tortured, afflicted, pined, consumed, wasted and tormented" Ann Putnam and "also for sundry other acts of witchcraft." The Procters' servant, the doctor's maid, and Ann's cousin Mary testified to the afflictions, observed at Burroughs's May hearing. (MSS 401, Phillips Library, Peabody Ess.e.x Museum) Detail from a seventeenth-century German engraving of a witches' Sabbath, a more symphonic production. The Puritan preoccupations are missing but certain notes chime: male and female partic.i.p.ants fly to a clearing; winged lions and monkey-goblins join them; frogs drop from the air. A woman tumbles from her uncooperative mount, as did the little Swedish girl and the elderly Ann Foster. (Walpurgisnacht, by Michael Herr: akg-images) Fifteenth-century French fliers. Among the earliest depictions of witches on brooms, the two are heretics rather than sorceresses-ironically, proto-Protestants from a sect that held that laypeople, of either s.e.x, could preach. While enchanted brooms turned up in Salem, they conveyed no one through the air. (akg-images) From a 1670 ill.u.s.tration of Sweden's witchcraft epidemic, to play a defining role at Salem. Families travel here as they did in Ess.e.x County; women did not elsewhere load broomsticks with their children. "Several have confessed against their own mothers," observed a minister in the Salem court-room, marveling that girls of eight or nine accused mothers of coercing them to sign diabolical pacts. (National Library of Sweden) Reverend Parris's account of his prison visit with Martha Corey. He found the self-described "gospel woman" obdurate and imperious, reluctant to pray with him. He p.r.o.nounced her an excommunicate; she hanged eight days later. (Courtesy Danvers Archival Center) From Martha Corey's deposition six months earlier. "Tell us who hurts these children," ordered Hathorne as the girls convulsed around her. "I do not know," she replied. She had no acquaintance with witchcraft. "You speak falsely," a court reporter chided, leading Corey ultimately to ask, "Can an innocent person be guilty?" Parris recorded her testimony for the court. (MSS 401, Phillips Library, Peabody Ess.e.x Museum)

Acknowledgments.

In 2008 David D. Hall observed that his decades in the seventeenth century had convinced him that the past remains eternally open to fresh questions; he could hardly have suspected that someone might read that line as an invitation. Patiently, incisively, and all too frequently, he has fielded queries ranging from the elementary to the insane. It is a pleasure at last to acknowledge a grat.i.tude equaled only by my admiration for his work. I owe an immeasurable debt as well to John Demos, who has made the seventeenth century a more congenial place than it could have been even on the sunniest, cider-soaked afternoon. There are not that many people who happen to know whether, if you were flying on a pole just above the treetops, heading southeast from Andover, in 1692, you would be able to glimpse the ocean in the distance. I am hugely grateful to Danvers town archivist Richard B. Trask, who does.

I have leaned, heavily at times, on the following experts: J. M. Beattie, Elizabeth Bouvier, Richard G.o.dbeer, Evan Haefeli, Hendrik Hartog, Richard R. Johnson, David Thomas Konig, Eve LaPlante, Kenneth P. Minkema, John M. Murrin, Daniel C. Richman, Bernard Rosenthal, David Grant Smith, Roger Thompson, Douglas Winiarski, and Michael P. Winship. For help with and around archives, I am indebted to Kent Bicknell, Robin Briggs, Carolyn Broomhead, Nicholas Cronk, Rebecca Ehrhardt, David Ferriero, Amanda Foreman, Jonathan Gala.s.si, Malcolm Gaskill, Birgitta Lagerlf-Genetay, Paul LeClerc, Marie Lennersand, Krishnakali Lewis, Maira Liriano, Megan Marshall, Scott McIsaac, Stephen Mitch.e.l.l, Oliver Morley, Robert J. O'Hara, Eunice Panetta, Caroline Preston, Kathleen Roe, Rob Shapiro, and Abby Wolf. For archival a.s.sistance and for permission to quote from ma.n.u.script collections, I should particularly like to thank Irene Axelrod, Sidney E. Berger, Kathy M. Flynn, and Catherine Robertson at the Peabody Ess.e.x Museum; D. Brenton Simons, Bridget Donahue, Timothy Salls, and Suzanne M. Stewart at the New England Historic Genealogical Society; Barbara S. Meloni at the Harvard University Archives, Pusey Library; Amy Coffin at the Topsfield Historical Society; Inga Larson and Carol Majahad at the North Andover Historical Society; Kris Kobialksa at the First Church of Salem; Dana C. Street at the Martha's Vineyard Museum; Richard B. Trask at the Danvers Archival Center, Peabody Inst.i.tute Library; Peter Drummey, Elaine Grublin, Elaine Heavey, and Brenda Lawson at the Ma.s.sachusetts Historical Society; Elizabeth Watts Pope, Ashley Cataldo, and Kimberly Toney Pelkey at the American Antiquarian Society; Barbara Austen at the Connecticut Historical Society; Justine Sundaram and Andrew Isodoro at Boston College's John J. Burns Library; and Elizabeth Bouvier, head of archives at the Ma.s.sachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

Matthew J. Boylan, Ella Delaney, Kate Foster, the indefatigable Mary Mann, Rachel Reiderer, David Smith, Tim Wales, and Andy Young supplied research and fact-checking a.s.sistance. Tom Puchniak expertly tracked down images. Anne Eisenberg, Lis Bensley, Ellen Feldman, Patti Foster, Harry G. Frankfurt, Sh.e.l.ley Freedman, Laurie Griffith, Mitch Katz, Charlotte Kingham, Souad Kriska, Mameve and Howard Medwed, Carmen Marino, Ronald C. Rosbottom, Robin Rue, Andrea Versenyi, Will Swift, Strauss Zelnick, and William Zinsser provided various seventeenth-century interventions. Elinor Lipman read these pages in their earliest incarnation and improved every one. Eric Simonoff and Alicia Gordon are the most inspired-and patient-of agents.

It has been a privilege to work again with the impeccable Michael Pietsch. I am indebted to him for many things but especially for his consummate skill with an erasable blue pen. He could have used ballpoint. Across the board, the Little, Brown team-in particular Reagan Arthur, Amanda Brower, Amanda Brown, Victoria Chow, Heather Fain, Liz Garriga, Jayne Yaffe Kemp, Marie Mundaca, the visionary, possibly wizardly Mario J. Pulice, Tracy Roe, and Tracy Williams-continues to astonish. Households suffer when women disappear into the archives too; if there is a way to thank Marc de La Bruyere and our children for thriving in my absence, I intend now to find it.

About the Author.

STACY SCHIFF is the author of Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Cleopatra: A Life, a #1 bestseller and winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography; Saint-Exupery, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize and the Amba.s.sador Book Award. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. The recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Schiff has contributed to The New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, as well as many other publications. She lives in New York City.

ALSO BY STACY SCHIFF.

Cleopatra: A Life A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) Saint-Exupery: A Biography

Selected Bibliography

Baker, Emerson W., and John G. Reid. The New England Knight: Sir William Phips, 16511695. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.

Boyer, Paul, and Stephen Nissenbaum. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.

---. Salem-Village Witchcraft: A Doc.u.mentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993.

Burr, George Lincoln. Narratives of the New England Witchcraft Cases. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002.

Cooper, James. F., Jr., and Kenneth P. Minkema. The Sermon Notebook of Samuel Parris, 16891694. Boston: Colonial Society of Ma.s.sachusetts, 1993.

Demos, John. The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World. New York: Viking, 2008.

---. Entertaining Salem: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Dow, George Francis, ed. The Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Ess.e.x County. 9 vols. Ess.e.x Inst.i.tute, 19111975.

Felt, James Barlow. Annals of Salem. 2 vols. Boston: James Munroe, 1845.

Gragg, Larry. A Quest for Security: The Life of Samuel Parris. New York: Greenwood, 1990.

Hall, David D. The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

---. Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

---. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Hansen, Chadwick. Witchcraft at Salem. New York: George Braziller, 1969.

Harris, Marguerite L., et al. John Hale: A Man Beset by Witches. Beverly, MA: Hale Family a.s.sociation, 1992.

Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. New York: Norton, 1998.

Koehler, Lyle. A Search for Power: The "Weaker s.e.x" in Seventeenth-Century New England. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980.

Konig, David Thomas. Law and Society in Puritan Ma.s.sachusetts. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981.

Mather, Cotton. Diary of Cotton Mather. 2 vols. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1911.

---. Magnalia Christi Americana, or the Ecclesiastical History of New England. Hartford, CT: Silas Andrus, 1820.

---. Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions. EEBO Editions, n.d.

---. The Wonders of the Invisible World. Forgotten Books, 2012.

Mather, Increase. An Essay for the Recording of Ill.u.s.trious Providences. EEBO Editions, n.d.

Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Vintage, 2003.

Perley, Sidney. The History of Salem, Ma.s.sachusetts, 16261716. 3 vols. Salem, MA, 1924.

"Perspectives on Witchcraft: Rethinking the Seventeenth-Century New England Experience," Ess.e.x Inst.i.tute Historical Collections, vols. 128 and 129, October 1992 and January 1993.

Phillips, James Duncan. Salem in the Seventeenth Century. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933.

Roach, Marilynne K. The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege. Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade, 2004.

Rosenthal, Bernard. Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Rosenthal, Bernard, et al., eds. Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Sewall, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Sewall. 2 vols. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.

Sibley, John Langdon. Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University in Cambridge, MA. Vols. 2 and 3. Cambridge, MA: C. W. Sever, 18731885.

Silverman, Kenneth. The Life and Times of Cotton Mather. New York: Welcome Rain, 2002.

Silverman, Kenneth, ed. Selected Letters of Cotton Mather. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971.